Practical applications of theoretical physics:
This series helps teachers demystify physics by showing students what it looks like. Field trips to hot-air balloon events, symphony concerts, bicycle shops, and other locales make complex concepts more accessible. Inventive computer graphics illustrate abstract concepts such as time, force, and capacitance, while historical reenactments of the studies of Newton, Leibniz, Maxwell, and others trace the evolution of theories. The Mechanical Universe helps meet different students' needs, from the basic requirements of liberal arts students to the rigorous demands of science and engineering majors. This series is also valuable for teacher professional development.

Produced by the California Institute of Technology and Intelecom. 1985.

The lecture "Our Place in the Cosmos" explains how we (and, for that matter, all complex life forms) are connected to the Universe around us. This connection relies on the fact that our Milky Way and other galaxies like it play host to cosmic recycling processes that involve the formation of stars and their planetary systems inside nebulae (dense gas/dust clouds), nuclear fusion reactions that occur within stars, and the death of massive stars in explosions known as supernovae. As a result of these processes the Earth contains elements like carbon, nitrogen, and oxygen, all of which are essential ingredients of protein molecules that are basic building blocks of life on Earth. To understand our origin we must therefore understand how galaxies form as part of the so-called cosmic web and evolve via galaxy cannibalism: merging and destruction of small satellite galaxies whereby their stars are incorporated into larger galaxies. This portion of the story will take us back to the earliest imaginable times in the history of the Universe. The talk will be illustrated with the latest astronomical images obtained using space-/ground-based telescopes and state-of-the-art computer simulations.

Speaker Info a écrit:

Raja (Puragra) GuhaThakurta received a bachelor's degree in Physics at Saint Xavier's College in Kolkata, India and a Ph.D. in Astrophysical Sciences at Princeton University in 1989. He was a postdoctoral researcher at the Institute for Advanced Study, Princeton, NJ and at Princeton University. He worked briefly at NASA's Space Telescope Science Institute in Balitmore, MD (operational headquarters of the Hubble Space Telescope), before joining the faculty of the University of California Santa Cruz in 1994 where he is currently a professor of Astronomy and Astrophysics. The primary focus of GuhaThakurta's research is the formation and evolution of galaxies, including the Andromeda galaxy. He has authored/coauthored ~350 journal articles and meeting abstracts, and has given dozens of lectures, both non-technical and technical. He received an Alfred P. Sloan Fellowship in 1997 and the Herzberg Memorial Prize and Fellowship in 2001.

The Large Hadron Collider at CERN in Geneva, Switzerland, has begun its study of physics at distances 10,000 times smaller than an atomic nucleus. This accelerator and its experiments are enormous in many respects---in the physical size of the facilites, in the sizes of the experimental teams, but also in the stakes for our understanding of elementary particles, mass, and the universe.

In this colloquium, Dr. Peskin will describe the physics questions that motivate the LHC experiments, the detectors that are designed to meet these goals, and the challenges that the experiments must overcome.

Dr. Peskin will show some of the first results from the LHC, including the status of the search for the much-anticipated Higgs boson.

UC Berkeley's Raphael Bousso presents a friendly introduction to the ideas behind the holographic principle, which may be very important in the hunt for a theory of quantum gravity. Series: "Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory Summer Lecture Series" [3/2006] [Science] [Show ID: 11140]

Full 90-minute program:What we touch. What we smell. What we feel. They’re all part of our reality. But what if life as we know it reflects only one side of the full story? Some of the world’s leading physicists think that this may be the case. They believe that our reality is a projection—sort of like a hologram—of laws and processes that exist on a thin surface surrounding us at the edge of the universe. Although the notion seems outlandish, it’s a long-standing theory that initially emerged years ago from scientists studying black holes; recently, a breakthrough in string theory propelled the idea into the mainstream of physics. What took place was an intriguing discussion on the cutting-edge results that may just change the way we view reality.

Practical applications of theoretical physics:
This series helps teachers demystify physics by showing students what it looks like. Field trips to hot-air balloon events, symphony concerts, bicycle shops, and other locales make complex concepts more accessible. Inventive computer graphics illustrate abstract concepts such as time, force, and capacitance, while historical reenactments of the studies of Newton, Leibniz, Maxwell, and others trace the evolution of theories. The Mechanical Universe helps meet different students' needs, from the basic requirements of liberal arts students to the rigorous demands of science and engineering majors. This series is also valuable for teacher professional development.

Produced by the California Institute of Technology and Intelecom. 1985.

The critically acclaimed television series The Mechanical Universe… And Beyond, created at Caltech and broadcast on PBS from 1985-86, is now available in its entirety on YouTube thanks to the efforts of Caltech's Institute's Information Science and Technology initiative.

The series was based on the Physics 1a and 1b courses developed by David Goodstein, the Frank J. Gilloon Distinguished Teaching and Service Professor and Professor of Physics and Applied Physics, Emeritus. It covers topics spanning the scientific revolution begun by Copernicus through quantum theory.